I tensed the muscles in my forearm, and the neural spring harness delivered the Tebbit knife into my hand.
I slashed sideways.
I was aiming for Kawahara’s side, below the floating ribs, but the combination of stun shakes and betathanatine crash threw me off and the knife blade sliced into her left arm below the elbow, jarred on the bone and bounced off. Kawahara yelled and released her grip on my eye. The pliers plunged down, off course, hit my cheekbone and carved a trough in the flesh of my cheek. I felt the pain distantly, metal snagging tissue. Blood spilled down into my eye. I stabbed again, weakly, but this time Kawahara twisted astride me and blocked downward with her injured arm. She yelled again and my fizzing glove grip on the knife slipped. The haft trickled away past my palm and the weapon was gone. Summoning all my remaining energy into my left arm, I hooked a savage punch up from the floor and caught Kawahara on the temple. She rolled off me, clutching at the wound in her arm, and for a moment I thought the blade had gone deep enough to mark her with the C-381 coating. But Sheila Sorenson had told me that the cyanide poisoning would do its work in the time it takes to draw a couple of breaths.
Kawahara was getting up.
“What the fuck are you waiting for?” she enquired acidly of Trepp. “Shoot this piece of shit, will you?”
Her voice died on the last word as she saw the truth in Trepp’s face an instant before the pale woman went for her holstered stungun. Maybe it was a truth that was only dawning on Trepp herself at that moment, because she was slow. Kawahara dropped the pliers, cleared both shard gun and stunner from her belt with a snap and levelled them before Trepp’s weapon was even halfway out of the holster.
“You traitorous fucking cunt,” Kawahara spat out wonderingly, her voice suddenly streaked through with a coarse accent I had never heard before. “You knew he was coming round, didn’t you? You’re fucking dead, bitch.”
I staggered upright and lurched into Kawahara just as she pulled the triggers. I heard both weapons discharge, the almost supra-aural whine of the shard gun and the sharp electrical splatter of the stunner. Through the fogged vision in the corner of one eye, I saw Trepp make a desperate bid to complete her draw and not even come close. She went down, face almost comically surprised. At the same time my shoulder smashed into Kawahara and we stumbled back towards the slope of the windows. She tried to shoot me but I flailed the guns aside with my arms and tripped her. She hooked at me with her injured arm and we both went down on the angled glass.
The stunner was gone, skittering across the floor, but she’d managed to hang on to the shard gun. It swung round at me and I batted it down clumsily. My other hand punched at Kawahara’s head, missed and bounced off her shoulder. She grinned fiercely and headbutted me in the face. My nose broke with a sensation like biting into celery and blood flooded down over my mouth. From somewhere I suffered an insane desire to taste it. Then Kawahara was on me, twisting me back against the glass and punching solidly into my body. I blocked one or two of the punches, but the strength was puddling out of me and the muscles in my arms were losing interest. Things started to go numb inside. Above me Kawahara’s face registered a savage triumph as she saw that the fight was over. She hit me once more, with great care, in the groin. I convulsed and slid down the glass into a sprawled heap on the floor.
“That ought to hold you, sport,” she grated, and jerked herself back to her feet, breathing heavily. Beneath the barely disarrayed elegance of her hair, I suddenly saw the face that this new accent belonged to. The brutal satisfaction in that face was what her victims in Fission City must have seen as she made them drink from the dull grey flask of the water carrier. “You just lie there for a moment.”
My body told me that I didn’t have any other option. I felt drenched in damage, sinking fast under the weight of the chemicals silting up my system and the shivering neural invasion of the stun bolt. I tried to lift one arm and it flopped back down like a fish with a kilo of lead in its guts. Kawahara saw it happen and grinned.
“Yeah, that’ll do nicely,” she said and looked absently down at her own left arm, where blood was trickling from the rent in her blouse. “You’re going to fucking pay for that, Kovacs.”
She walked across to Trepp’s motionless form. “And you, you fuck,” she said, kicking the pale woman hard in the ribs. The body did not move. “What did this motherfucker do for you, anyway? Promise to eat your cunt for the next decade?”
Trepp made no response. I strained the fingers of my left hand and managed to move them a few centimetres across the floor towards my leg. Kawahara went to the desk with a final backward glance at Trepp’s body and touched a control.
“Security?”
“Ms Kawahara.” It was the same male voice that had grilled Ortega on our approach to the airship. “There’s been an incursion on the—”
“I know what there’s been,” said Kawahara tiredly. “I’ve been wrestling with it for the last five minutes. Why aren’t you down here?”
“Ms Kawahara?”
“I said, how long does it take you to get your synthetic ass down here on a call out?”
There was a brief silence. Kawahara waited, head bowed over the desk. I reached across my body and my right and left hands met in a weak clasp, then curled closed on what they held and fell back.
“Ms Kawahara, there was no alert from your cabin.”
“Oh.” Kawahara turned back to look at Trepp. “OK, well get someone down here now. Squad of four. There’s some garbage to take out.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
In spite of everything, I felt a smile crawl onto my mouth. Ma’am?
Kawahara came back, scooping the pliers up off the floor on her way. “What are you grinning at, Kovacs?”
I tried to spit at her, but the saliva barely made it out of my mouth and hung in a thick streamer over my jaw, mingled with the blood. Kawahara’s face distorted with sudden rage and she kicked me in the stomach. On top of everything else, I barely felt it.
“You,” she began savagely, then forced the level of her voice back down to an accentless icy calm, “have caused more than enough trouble for one lifetime.”
She took hold of my collar and dragged me up the angled slope of the window until we were at eye level. My head lolled back on the glass and she leaned over me. Her tone eased back, almost to conversational.
“Like the Catholics, like your friends at Innenin, like the pointless motes of slum life whose pathetic copulations brought you into existence, Takeshi. Human raw material — that’s all you’ve ever been. You could have evolved beyond it and joined me on New Beijing, but you spat in my face and went back to your little people existence. You could have joined us again, here on Earth, joined in the steerage of the whole human race this time. You could have been a man of power, Kovacs. Do you understand that? You could have been significant.”
“I don’t think so,” I murmured weakly, starting to slide back down the glass. “I’ve still got a conscience rattling around in here somewhere. Just forgotten where I put it.”
Kawahara grimaced and redoubled her hold on my collar. “Very witty. Spirited. You’re going to need that, where you’re going.”
“When they ask how I died,” I said, “tell them: still angry.”
“Quell.” Kawahara leaned closer. She was almost lying on top of me now, like a sated lover. “But Quell never went into virtual interrogation, did she? You aren’t going to die angry, Kovacs. You’re going to die pleading. Over. And over. Again.”